Best Knowledge Available when Needed

The second pillar in the Roadmap provided by the AMIA is best knowledge available when needed. The pillar contains three key challenges:

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  When needed: Integration in clinical workflow
  
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  Knowledge is available: so it has to be written, stored and transmitted in a format that makes it easy to build and deploy CDSS interventions
  
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  Best knowledge: Only CDSS which provides current and additional information has potential
  

A key success factor of CDSS is that they are integrated into the clinical workflow. CDSS not integrated into clinical workflow will have no beneficial effect and will not be used [46]. Messages should be presented at the moment of decision-making, though with as less disturbance for the physician as possible. Therefore, different alert mechanisms (pop-up, automatic lab order, prescription order, emails, etc.) should be developed, suitable for different alerting priorities [47]. Understanding how to prompt physicians successfully at the point of care is a complex problem, and requires consideration of technological, clinical, and socio-technical issues. As mentioned earlier, interruptive (active) alerts show significantly higher effectiveness than non-interruptive (passive) reminders [48]. Additionally, a greater positive impact was observed when recommendations prompted an action and could not be ignored [49]. Thoroughly understanding the clinical workflow and users’ wishes strongly increases the probability for success [49]. One of the more recent attempts to incorporate CDSS into clinical workflow was to incorporate CDSS advice into checklists often used in ward rounds [50]. An example of such a particular system is Tracebook. This is a process-oriented and context-aware dynamic checklist, showing great promise and good user acceptability [51].